One of my internet bad habits is reading FARK.com. Occasionally I see worthwhile stuff there, and sometimes it keeps me connected with a certain aspect of the zeitgeist, but generally it falls squarely into the “time-wasting” category. Today, it managed to be quite depressing as well, due to the commentary on this incident: a woman was apparently threatened by a knife-wielding assailant; the woman called her husband; the husband showed up and shot at the assailant, missing; the assailant ran away; the husband got his SUV, pursued the assailant, hit him with the car, and then hit him with the car another two times, killing him. The prevailing FARK sentiment is that the husband is a hero for these actions.
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It’s mind-boggling to me that the United States is actually trying to build a fence between itself and Mexico. I mean, really. A fence? A fence seven hundred miles long?
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Today the US Senate voted to authorize warrantless wiretapping, and to grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies who aided in the recent illegal wiretapping. I do, in truth, find this outrageous and disgusting, particularly since the upshot of the discovery and uproars appears to be “well, now we’ve made it legal and so you can’t cause trouble again by finding out what we’re doing in the future”. But the disgust and outrage are a tad on the anemic side.
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Last Monday I went to a Long Now Foundation seminar by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan—both books I would recommend to just about everyone. The title of the talk was “The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought”, and while Taleb did talk about our historic inability to predict what was going to happen in the future, I didn’t feel that ‘future craziness’ was actually a major theme. (If you change “Crazier” to “More Unpredictable” you get a more accurate title.)
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So the US Government, primarily through the FBI, has been pseudo-deputizing a bunch of private-sector individuals to aid in “infrastructure protection”. The group is called InfraGard, and I’m not quite sure how to capture the mix of creepy and tacky (not to mention authoritarian) that they represent.
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This is a fourth-order post, a post about a post about a review of a book. Such are the times we live in. Which times, according to the book, are not necessarily cut off from much of human existence by the division of the past into history and ‘prehistory’. The blog post is Internal Affairs: Biochemistry and the Body Politic, the review is Steve Mithen in the London Review of Books on Daniel Lord Smail’s Deep History and the Brain.
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Last night I got around to watching the recently-leaked Tom Cruise Scientology video. Probably old news to a lot of people, since it’s been doing the rounds online, but if you missed it, it’s worth a look.
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Short post today, I’m not feeling well. I’ll just point you to Jonathon Schwarz’s note regarding how National Review acknowledged serious errors in a piece of theirs reporting on Lebanon.
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Apparently anything less that total compliance warrants being electrocuted. I don’t think this one, involving a motorist protesting at being given a speeding ticket, is as egregious as either the UCLA or University of Florida incidents. But it’s still wrong.
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By which I do not mean magickal thinking… I mean thinking that tremendous change can be effected through events, speech or revelations that are talismanic in nature. The idea that if the correct words could just be spoken, or if the truth revealed, that “the people” would rise up/awaken/revolt/vote differently/stop watching television/reject their role as imperialist enablers/cast off their self-accepted shackles/achieve enlightenment/achieve whatever your particular goal for them is. A certain brand of tax evader in the US falls into this category.
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At any given moment, while thinking (or thinking about thinking), we appear to ourselves to be somewhat rational, free-willed beings. We’re able to think (I think), and to control what we think about to some extent. We conceive of ourselves, mostly, as discrete and singular “I”s who are conscious and whose selves somehow belong to us.
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The story about a University of Florida student being tasered by campus police at a John Kerry speech is all over the net at this point. It’s fairly grotesque, although I think the UCLA campus library incident from last year was even worse. As then, however, one of the most disturbing things about it are the commenters who emerge to justify the violence perpetrated by the authorities.
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Six years ago, I first heard about the planes on SlashDot. I thought it was a hoax, someone hacking their submission system, at first. I wasn’t as accustomed to getting my non-tech news online, then, and went to cnn.com, and from there to CNN on television, to find out that it was no hoax.
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It probably wasn’t a good idea to start the day with this piece on Fred Thompson trying to pass himself off as a “regular guy”.
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It struck me this evening that the concept of evil being a force external to human beings is very odd. The same goes for good, but it seems that evil is more frequently cited—perhaps because people tend to take at least some credit for their own good works, while being generally happy to claim that their bad acts were at least influenced, if not coerced, by some outside agency. The idea that evil is a force, or that evil non-human forces seek to encourage us to do evil, pushes one’s conception of the world to a very different place.
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After my last post on suggestibility, I wasn’t sure whether or not I was overly gullible regarding Derren Brown’s claims.
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I just read an article about the ACLU’s plans to give out video cameras to local residents in St. Louis for the purpose of videotaping the police, and I also read the Fark thread on it. I’m rather disturbed by the number of people in that thread who exhibit such hostility towards the idea that the police should be monitored in such a fashion.
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I love table tennis. It’s a fantastic game, and one that I’ve loved for years. I played it a fair amount in college, which is when I became good enough at it to really enjoy it. Since then I’ve played it very little, but Metaweb has a table, and that’s reminded me how great it is.
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I’m currently reading Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Fooled by Randomness, which is excellent, and which I’ll probably write more posts about once I’ve finished it. Right now, I find quite striking his approach to overcoming human irrationality: he assumes that overcoming it is near-impossible and so seeks instead to avoid triggering it.

For example, he writes about how status is extremely relative, such that a family with an income of about $500K/year who live on Park Avenue feel like complete losers because they associate with much wealthier people. He then notes that they could try to rationally overcome their feelings of status anxiety (by comparing themselves to the larger population), but that this is unlikely to be effective, and his suggestion is to move to a poorer neighborhood and associate with poorer people. The irrational status comparisons will continue, but now they’ll be more favorable.
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After some IM discussion about the tendency that humans have to over- or underestimate risks (a topic that I’ll probably post about fairly soon) and about how our belief structures will tend to alter our risk and probability projections (a topic I touch on frequently) my friend Brian passed along links to some Derren Brown videos. Derren Brown is a kind of “magician”/con artist/hypnotist. I’d never heard of him before, but watching his videos has made me reconsider quite a bit about human nature.
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This Guardian (UK) article discusses the difficulties that Gay pride organizers are having in Eastern Europe. It’s not a surprise, because it’s been clear for a few years that the prevailing sentiment in the ex-Communist countries is very anti-gay, but it’s still disturbing.
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Yesterday I decided to attempt the Tuesday Guardian’s “Countdown” nine-letter anagram, which was CUPTIEMAN. I spent maybe thirty minutes on it in total during the day, getting more or less nowhere, trying a bunch of likely-two letter combinations to begin the word that didn’t help me.
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This article about Lego, power, and property in an elementary school was completely fascinating to me. It recounts the experiences in a clearly “alternative” school when the teachers and children attempted to unravel what was causing conflict over the resources of “Legotown”.

If you have any interest in politics, equality, children, education, or the nature of property, read the article.
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